Category Archives: History

Insurgency Season at U.S. Southern Border

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Shocking images from cameras on Texas-Mexico border capture steady stream of illegal immigrants sneaking into the United States with packages of drugs and guns

  • Network of more than 1,000 cameras are installed on farms and ranches 
  • Have been strategically placed in areas that have not been secured 
  • ‘Sophisticated‘ system led to the apprehension of nearly 30,000 suspects
  • Has also slowed down cartel operations and drug smuggling 

 
See the video here. And for still images from the cameras, click here.

Cameras placed along Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico have captured the stream of illegal immigrants sneaking into the country on a daily basis.

The network of more than 1,000 motion detectors, similar to those used to film wildlife, have been placed strategically in areas that have not been secured – where Mexican citizens can cross and evade capture with ease.

They helped border guards apprehend nearly 30,000 suspects and led to 88,400 pounds of drugs being seized in 2014 as part of Operation Drawbridge.

The system has also had a significant impact on Mexican cartels and their ability to smuggle narcotics, people and stolen vehicles between the two countries. The startling images have been revealed as President Obama continues to fight to push through an executive order to shield illegal immigrants from deportation.

Earlier this month a federal judge in Texas refused to lift a temporary block on a White House immigration plan.

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the ‘sophisticated’ cameras are stationed on ranches and farms on the border.

The turn on when movement is detected and are monitored in real-time, around-the-clock by a number of agencies.

If they think suspicious activity is taking place, they alert law enforcement in a bid to get them to cut them off.

Steven McCraw, the director of the agency, said: ‘Every day, sheriff’s deputies, police officers, Border Patrol agents and state law enforcement officers in the Texas border region risk their lives to protect Texas and the entire nation from Mexican cartels and transnational crime.

‘This innovative use of technology has proven to be a force multiplier in detecting the smuggling attempts along the border, which is critical to interdicting criminal activity occurring between the ports of entry.

‘Any time law enforcement interdicts a smuggling attempt, we consider it a significant gain in the fight against the cartels and their operatives.

‘The collaborative law enforcement efforts of Operation Drawbridge have bolstered our ability to combat the exploitation of our border by these ruthless criminals.’

In March it was revealed more immigrants are choosing more remote and dangerous crossing points to make it to the United States.

The Border Patrol has responded by expanding its search-and-rescue teams to monitor the area, as a growing number of bodies of suspected illegal immigrants are being found.

Many of the bodies are being discovered just southwest of Mission, Texas, where the fire department’s dive-and-rescue team has had a busy winter. In January and February alone, it recovered at least six bodies in the murky canals.

In February, governor Greg Abbot claimed that had 20,000 illegal immigrants had already entered the country since the start of the year.

Who is that Devil at Obama’s Heels?

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Found in the bowels of the Cambridge Library a video was discovered of Barack Obama where he not only delivered a book reading of one chapter in his book, ‘Dreams From My Father’. Beyond reading this particular chapter where he explains his relationship with his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, Barack Obama during this event in 1995 also has a question and answer session with those in attendance. Clearly, he is conflicted on race relations, wants to continue to advance the politics on race and most of all speaks to tribes that need more attention.
He explains his intermittent disdain for his grandparents on his mother’s side while speaks to his isolation and anger over his father leaving him as well.

There are some additional truths that surface in this video, speaking deeper to his history than otherwise known today. He maintains anger still today on the Reagan Bush era on his notion that they did next to nothing on civil rights which Obama says was a prime time to do so given the Cold War had ended and resources, attention and government could now turn inward and address the racial divisions at home. For Barack Obama, discrimination is the core of life’s objective.

A big hat tip to Breitbart for this great find. In it, Obama talks about sitting with Davis in his home drinking whiskey listening to him talk about how “black people have a reason to hate… so you might as well get used to it.”  More here.

 

 

 

 

Beware, See Who Barack Obama Really is

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With more than six years in the White House, it is time to look once again at who Barack Obama really is. There are a handful of months left to his administration and the additional damage waged by his regime will likely be epic. To forecast what is to come, a review of his history must have a second look.
The Betrayal Papers: Part V – Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

Introduction

The Betrayal Papers have thus far investigated and explained the Obama administration and their alliance with the international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. The articles analyzed several aspects of White House policy, foreign and domestic, and compared them to the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Parts V and VI will explore the personal ties that bind Obama, as well as the progressive American left, to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is a portrait of a conspiracy that has reached unprecedented heights of global control.

“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”

Has there ever been a president whose personal history is so murky, so questionable, and so baffling? All one must do is recall the allegations, still open for debate and research, that checker Obama’s background. Laid out below are some of these allegations, not to be proved or disproved, but to remind the reader that Obama’s personal history is replete with question marks.

• A 1991 promotional literary pamphlet featured a short biographical sketch of Obama, and claimed he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

• What is his actual name? The only publicly available school record for Obama lists him as an Indonesian citizen named Barry Soetoro.

• Moreover, on an immigration document from 1965, Obama’s mother included the name “Soebarkah” under Barack Hussein Obama. This is likely a name given to him by the Islamic cult of Subud, to which his mother proudly and openly belonged.

• For a reason yet to be explained, Obama’s Social Security number begins with the prefix 042, which corresponds to Connecticut, a state in which Obama has never lived.

• Regarding his academic records, recall that Obama attended three universities: Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard University (his admission to which coincides with a $25 million dollar donation from the Saudi’s to the Harvard Law School). His academic records with these three institutions have never been revealed, despite efforts by investigative reporters. The student body president at Columbia University during Obama’s time there, Wayne Allen Root (once the Libertarian Party Vice Presidential candidate), has stated publicly that he never met or even heard of Obama while at Columbia, and cannot find any classmates of his who remember him either. Root, like Obama, was a political science major.

• While campaigning for President, candidate Obama presented himself as a “Professor” of Constitutional Law while at the University of Chicago. Yet this turned out to be untrue. In fact, he was a “Senior Lecturer,” a title and position significantly less prestigious than Professor.

• Finally, the best known and most researched of these allegations is the issue of Obama’s birth certificate. From his days as a candidate in the Democrat primary, the place of Obama’s birth has been in contention. While Obama has insisted he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, there are others who claim he was born in Mombasa, Kenya; there’s even a copy of his purported Kenyan birth certificate. Moreover, apparently trustworthy sources swear that the Long Form Birth Certificate is a forgery.

All these questions leave the investigator with only one choice: to define Obama not by his inconsistent biographical details, but by his associations and actions.

The Communist Prelude: Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s Mentor

As documented extensively in Paul Kengor’s book The Communist, Davis ranks high among Obama’s early life influences. A literal card carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Davis was considered by the FBI an enemy of the state.

• Frank Marshall Davis, a known Soviet Communist and admirer of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, was a friend of Obama’s mother’s father, Stanley Dunham.
• The Communist Davis lived in both Hawaii and in Chicago. He was Barack Obama’s mentor through the 1970s, until his departure for Occidental College in 1979.
• Davis was also a pornographer. In his book Sex Rebel, he wrote excitedly about having sex with minors. Pedophilia was unusual for Communists of the era: Harry Hay, another Communist and associate of Davis, was reportedly an advocate of NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association.
• In 1995, in a broadcast on Cambridge Municipal Television, Barack Obama described Davis as “a close friend of my maternal grandfather, a close friend of gramps” and “fairly a well-known poet.”

Irrespective of the publicly accepted, sanitized biography of young Obama, the historical facts establish that his primary political mentor was a Soviet Communist sex offender, introduced to him by his mother’s family.

Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are

George Soros

George Soros, aka György Schwartz, is the Hungarian-born billionaire investor and financier behind a tangled constellation of progressive front organizations. Among these front organizations are: The Open Society Foundation/Institute, ACORN, Think Progress, the Center for American Progress, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, National Council of La Raza, the Tides Foundation, MoveOn.org, the New America Foundation, and the International Crisis Group. As one writer wrote succinctly in 2011, “Essentially, the entire leftist wing of the Democrat party, including the President can be tied to George Soros in some way.”

• Soros was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish family. He grew up in wartime Hungary and was an admitted Nazi collaborator who turned other Jews over to the Nazi authorities. To this day, he has stated that he has no remorse for his actions of turning in Jews to the Nazis and having their property confiscated. As Soros said to 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft it was “the happiest time of my life.”
• Soros is a financial manipulator and breaker of currencies. In 1992, Soros crashed the British pound when he made a bet it would correct against the Deutschemark.
• Soros has a history of using government influence for personal gain. In 1999, (Bill Clinton’s) Secretary of State Madeline Albright blocked a $500 million loan by the U.S. Import-Export Bank to the Russian oil company Tyumen. Tyumen planned to use this money to acquire one of Soros’ companies and a Siberian oil field, and apparently Soros felt his deal wasn’t sweet enough. A few months later, Albright did indeed approve the loan, but only after Soros was guaranteed additional protections for his interests at the expense of Tyumen.
• This pattern repeated in 2009, when the U.S. Import-Export Bank announced a “preliminary commitment” to loan $2 billion to the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras. This caused the shares in the company to rise 27.9% from April 2009-August 2009 (the time of the announcement). Soros, a major shareholder in the company, profited handsomely.
• In 2002, French authorities prosecuted Soros for insider trading. In 2012, the government of Russia issued an arrest warrant for Soros for violating Basel II financial regulations.
• Obama’s foreign policy and the Arab Spring are intertwined with Soros interests. In 2008 the International Crisis Group (aka ICG, a Soros front), issued a paper that urged the Egyptian government to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to form a political party. Anyone with knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Egypt from the 1940s onward, which include assassinations and terrorism, understands the necessity of the Egyptian government’s hard line on the terror group.
• Interestingly, ICG is also home to Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the Obama administration’s lead investigator for Benghazi, as well as Robert Malley, who was recently appointed by Obama to a prominent position to lead Middle East policy, despite a history of connections to Hamas.
• In a 2011 op-ed for the Washington Post, Soros himself referred to Israel – not Hamas – as the “stumbling block” in Middle East peace. In the same piece, Soros encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood to be given a seat at the table in Egyptian political life, and urged Obama to support the Arab Spring overthrow of ally Mubarak.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn

Of all the nefarious personal relationships of Barack Hussein Obama, the bloodthirsty couple of Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dorhn are the most unsettling. In the 1960s, Ayers and Dohrn were notorious radicals, anarchists, and terrorists – declared enemies of American society.

Ayers and Dorhn hosted a meet-and-greet and fundraiser for candidate Obama when he first ran for public office. Indeed, Obama’s political career was launched from the couple’s living room in Hyde Park.

• Bill Ayers’ father was Tom Ayers, President of Commonwealth Edison (the power company of Chicago) from 1964-1980, and Chairman from 1973-1980. The Ayers family was close to the corrupt Daley political machine and involved in various philanthropic causes, and Bill was a son of considerable privilege. The Ayers family connection to power production is important to note in connection with the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will be detailed in Part VI.
• Despite his mainstream upbringing, Ayers gravitated to terrorism and revolution. In 1969, he, Dorhn, and other radicals founded the Weather Underground. From its inception until the early 1980s, this group of nihilist anarchists would claim responsibility for targets that included police, an R.O.T.C building, the home of a judge, New York City Police Headquarters, and The Pentagon.
• Dorhn and Ayers lived for a time as fugitives together, and eventually married. But due to legal technicalities neither Ayers nor Dorhn ever served time for their crimes.
• The couple has two sons. Both were, curiously, given Islamic names: Zayd and Malik.
• Ayers has admitted not once, but twice that he is author of the Obama’s memoir, Dreams of my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995.
• On September 11, 2001, a review of an upcoming book by Bill Ayers appeared in the New York Times. In the memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounted his time on the lam. Wrote Ayers in the book, the lines which were reprinted in the Times the morning of September 11: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
• A few hours after that edition of New York Times hit newsstands on 9/11/2001, four planes were hijacked by Al Qaeda. Two of them brought down the World Trade Center. Another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the other slammed into the Pentagon, once a target of Bill Ayers, scarring the symbol of American military might and killing 125 people.
• Consider the psyche of Dohrn (from 1991-2013 a professor at Northwestern Law School) who, upon hearing of the horrific murder of actress Sharon Tate (where a fork was stuck into her nine-month pregnant belly) by psychopath Charles Manson’s gang, stated: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!” Dohrn then adopted the “fork salute” for the Weatherman.
• Years after 9/11/2001, Dohrn and Ayers would openly associate with Islamic terrorists. First, in connection with the 2010 “Peace Flotilla,” a terrorist smuggling operation originating from Turkey that sought to arm Hamas in Gaza. The rabid couple’s attraction to terrorism was enabled by the Soros front group, Code Pink.
• In 2011, Ayers and Dohrn teamed up with Code Pink once again when they crashed the revolution in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to help oust American and Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak. Reliving their youth, they pulled a page from their old playbook, teaching the protestors how to organize their very own “day of rage.”

Valerie Jarrett

No figure in the administration holds more sway over Barack Obama than his Senior Advisor, Valerie Jarrett. Officially in charge of the Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, her Twitter handle – vj44, as in “Valerie Jarrett, 44th President” – conveys a truer sense of her power. Yet not even one American voted for President Jarret.

• Valerie June Bowman Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1956 to James and Barbara Taylor Bowman. An examination of Jarrett’s family is the key to understanding her influence in Chicago.
• Jarrett’s father James, a Howard University graduate, was, at the time of her birth, working as a physician and geneticist in Iran. Her mother Barbara’s family is deeply connected to Chicago politics. Jarret’s maternal grandfather was Robert Taylor, who was on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, a municipal corporation. To this day the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project, bear his name.
• A political appointment, Jarrett was not subjected to confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Yet according to every published account, it is she who is the true center of gravity in the administration. Ranging from healthcare “reform” to negotiating with terrorist Iran, the Senior Advisor, not the President, calls the shots at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
• The few murmurings which have come out regarding Jarrett’s omnipresence in the White House have not been flattering. According to one former administration official, “It’s pretty toxic… She went to whatever meeting she wanted to go to—basically all of them—and then would go and whisper to the president. Or at least everyone believed she did. … People don’t trust the process. They think she’s a spy.”
• Even Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, according to author Jonathan Alter, was “tired of being undermined by Valerie Jarrett” when he resigned from his position.
• Given Jarrett’s political force in the capital, the media’s curiosity about Jarrett’s background, governing principles, ideological beliefs, and business dealings has been conspicuously lacking.
• One of Robert Taylor’s (Jarret’s grandfather) business partners was Rufus Cook. Rufus’s ex-wife, Ann, is a cousin of Jarrett’s. Cook is also a legal counsel for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, based out of Chicago. In 2007, the country was shocked when a video emerged that showed the pastor of Obama’s church, Reverend Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, saying of September 11, 2001, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” This was a borrowed line, originally spoken by the Nation of Islam’s silver-tongued spokesman, Malcolm X, referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
• Indeed, TUCC’s Reverend Wright and NOI’s Louis Farrakhan are thick as thieves. In 1984, Wright and Farrakhan traveled together to Libya to meet the “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” Muammar Gaddafi.
• Another Jarrett cousin is Antoinette “Toni” Cook Bush, daughter of Rufus and Ann. In 2013, Toni, a Chicago lawyer, was hired as the head lobbyist for News Corp, owner of Fox News. This is perhaps why Jarrett has been spotted dining with News Corp CEO, Australian Rupert Murdoch.
• Jarrett’s family has direct connections to Obama’s Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Jarrett’s father in law, Vernon Jarrett, was a journalist who worked with Frank Marshall Davis Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers. In his younger years, explains Kengor, Vernon Jarrett “had been elected to the Illinois Council of American Youth for Democracy, the CPUSA youth wing.” Finally, Robert Taylor (mentioned above) was on the board of Chicago Civil Liberties Union with Frank Marshall Davis.

Jarrett, who met Obama in 1991 and introduced him to Michelle, is a part of their family. Given her connections and power, is it any surprise that she recently said to The New York Times Magazine, “I intend to stay [in the White House] until the lights go off.”

Tony Rezko

Antoin “Tony” Rezko is the Chicago-based Syrian-American slumlord who arranged a corrupt deal for the Obama’s home. Rezko, who is currently serving a 10 ½ year prison sentence and was known for influence peddling through bribery, crafted a special deal in which he loaned money to the Obamas and donated to their campaign organization … all while setting them up in a mansion in Hyde Park.

• Obama’s relationship with the corrupt Rezko goes back decades. Rezko tried to hire Obama to work for his real estate company Rezmar when he graduated from Harvard Law School. In 2008, Obama stated that Rezko was a “friend” whom he had “known for 20 years.”
• The Chicago Sun-Times estimated that Obama had received “$168,308 from Rezko and his circle.”
• In 2005, Rezko arranged the purchase of the Obamas’ home in Chicago. Because the Obama’s were not in the financial position to purchase the house at the time, Rezko made a deal with the owner to purchase the adjoining empty lot next to the home at above market price to compensate for the Obamas’ below market offer on the home ($1.65 million versus the $1.95 asking price).
• The Rezko case unfolded before the nation as Barack Obama was ascending to the presidency. It embroiled Patrick Fitzgerald (who was previously known for prosecuting Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby), Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich (who is serving a 14 year jail sentence), Obama, and Rezko.
• The convicted felon Rezko is an associate of international criminal and former Saddam Hussein agent, Iraqi Nadhmi Auchi.

Nadhmi Auchi

The Iraqi operator Nadhmi Auchi is the sort of rarefied sort of gentlemen you would normally come across in a spy novel. On the surface, Nadhmi Auchi is a business magnate, a dynamo philanthropist, and an honored citizen of many countries. As was explained by a former senior official of the Defense, State, and Commerce departments, John A. Shaw, Mr. Auchi made a name for himself as the international financier and arms dealer extraordinaire of Saddam Hussein. By 1980, Auchi was an asset of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6. (So multi-faceted is this billionaire mystery man that he has his own dedicated Wikileaks page.) Auchi and Tony Rezko were partners in real estate and pizza.

• Contemporary to the timeline of Obama’s political rise in Chicago, Auchi was building an influence operation one brick at a time in the very same city. His ties from the Middle East to America’s Midwest made his enterprise a conduit of Middle Eastern money into the United States of America.
• Shaw writes, “Nadhmi Auchi, despite his purchased respectability in England, was the financial eminence behind the Chicago-Arab combine, and the man who, with Rezko, helped invent Barack Obama as a political star.” Through Tony Rezko, his local bagman, Auchi financed and guided Obama (and Jarrett) into the Oval Office.
• While a large shareholder in BNP Paribas, Auchi was involved with the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which was based on the sale of Iraqi oil.
• In 2004, Auchi was banned from entering the U.S. for scamming the Pentagon on an Iraqi cellular deal he helped broker. After securing rights to Iraq’s cellular services, Auchi went on to corner the market on power contracts for the post-war transition, as well.
• If Soros personifies the Progressive wing of Obama’s politics, it is Auchi that personifies the wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Auchi’s stances on litmus test issues tell who he is, politically speaking, in the Middle East. Auchi is anti-Semitic, and led support for the Turkish terror flotilla (an operation which ties him to Ayers, Dorhn, and Soros).
• It may seem an odd dichotomy that two people in low cost housing, Valerie Jarrett and Toni Rezko, and two artful and sophisticated investors, Auchi and Soros (both of whom are convicted of financial crimes in France), ushered Obama to the presidency. Yet each one of these individuals shares one lethal trait: they are masters at using government for their personal gain.
• Auchi has a history of suing his critics, and silencing those who cause too much trouble. His reputation as an aggressive litigator and someone who won’t hesitate to kill may have convinced journalist David Ignatius to think twice about disclosing his knowledge of Auchi’s activities. For instead of a nonfiction book, Ignatius did indeed pen a spy novel, The Bank of Fear, based on Auchi’s career.

Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said

Rashid Khalidi is an anti-Semitic professor and historian of Palestine. Khalidi is currently the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. During their Chicago years, the Obamas were close friends with Khalidi and his wife, Mona. They were also friends with Edward Said, Khalidi’s mentor.

• Throughout the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at the University of Beirut, he routinely spoke on behalf of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization.
• The Obamas and Khalidis have been friends for decades. When in Chicago, the Obamas regularly dined with the Khalidis.
• In 1998, the Obamas attended a banquet which featured Edward Said as the keynote speaker. Said, a Palestinian-American (now deceased), had long been a critic of the State of Israel, which he referred to as being in “illegal military occupation since 1967.”
• In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama when he was running for Congress. The following year, the Woods Foundation (where Obama served as a Board member) donated $40,000 to Mona Khalidi’s charity.
• As one pro-Palestinian activist phrased it in 2008, when Obama’s views on Israel and Palestine were a subject of controversy: “I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates.”

With the benefit of more than six years of hindsight, it is clear that Barack Hussein Obama (with the eager cooperation of Secretary of State John Kerry) has been the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian president in United States history.

Conclusion

A man does not become President of the United States without very high powered connections. Usually these connections are accumulated through a long career of public service, whether in the U.S. Congress, Executive, or on the state level. Obama rose to the Presidency after serving a scant four years in the U.S. Senate, two of which were spent running for President. Prior to that, he served an unremarkable seven years in the Illinois State Senate.

Before launching his political career in the living room of American anarchists, Obama was a community-organizing lawyer for progressive groups. Among them was ACORN, which was instrumental in creating the housing bubble.

With such little authentic biography available, we are forced to define Obama by his friends. They include financial and political manipulators and fixers, corrupt businessmen and international criminals, card-carrying Communists and FBI-identified enemies of the state, terrorists foreign and domestic, and their academic apologists.

Part VI will conclude The Betrayal Papers with a look at the various interconnected schemes of the above-named Obama associates.

 

 

 

Wining Hearts and Minds Continues

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Not all those people in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or in other countries are hostile to the West. Blanket condemnation is a poorly assigned label. What does need a harder look is the failed in-state policy to restore order in countries where tyrannical regimes reign. So if you see any Afghanis in America, don’t be especially alarmed. Case in point, anyone remember who saved Marcus Luttrell, as depicted in the movie Lone Survivor?

Afghan commandos undertake a special mission to Texas to launch a wounded warrior program

JUNCTION, TEXAS — A group of Afghan commandos gathered in Texas earlier this month to prepare for a special mission: changing the hearts and minds of their own military and countrymen.

 

Commandos are highly respected in Afghanistan, considered national heroes by many.

But lose a limb, and the Afghan army has little use for them. Typically, the wounded soldiers are forced onto pensions or into the world to fend for themselves.

That’s what Command Sgt. Maj. Faiz Mohammad Wafa, the top enlisted leader for Afghanistan’s special operations forces, hopes to change. Wafa brought with him to Texas four commandos, each missing a leg, who will form the base of a new wounded warrior program.

The program, for Afghan special operators, will be the first of its kind for a nation that has a growing population of wounded warriors spanning generations.

With the cooperation of U.S. Special Operations Command and NATO Special Operations Component Command Afghanistan, Wafa led his commandos to the Hill Country of south Texas for the weeklong visit.

The men learned how to open up about their own injuries and were coached on public speaking, fundraising and how to best care for others like them.

Wafa considers the mission a matter of national security.

Without proof that the army takes care of its own and their families, he said, how can it expect new recruits to put their lives on the line?

Roever Foundation

Wafa and his commandos arrived in Texas on March 29, traveling with two U.S. soldiers from the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command Special Operations Advisory Group.

Their week stay came on a picturesque ranch spanning roughly 250 acres.

On a veranda overlooking a sweeping landscape filled with passing antelope, sheep and other animals, Wafa said a wounded warrior program was integral to the continued success of the Afghan army.

Leading the charge was the Roever Foundation, a Texas-based nonprofit that operates two ranches offering programs for wounded warriors.

At the foundation’s Eagles Summit Ranch, roughly two hours outside of San Antonio, Dave Roever and his son, Matt, led the weeklong engagement with the Afghan commandos.

Dave Roever is a wounded warrior himself, having served in Vietnam in the Navy as a Brown Water Black Beret.

Eight months into his tour in 1969, Roever was burned beyond recognition when a phosphorous grenade exploded in his hand. He spent 14 months hospitalized and underwent numerous surgeries, but his sense of humor and purpose were unscathed.

In the decades following his injuries, Roever has spoken to an estimated 7million students in public schools across the country.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he refocused his mission, aiming to serve a new generation of wounded warriors.

It was through those efforts that Roever met the current commander of Fort Bragg and the 18th Airborne Corps, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson.

Anderson became familiar with the foundation while stationed in Colorado, home of the first Eagles Summit Ranch.

In the years since, Roever has conducted several programs for Anderson’s soldiers and has attended the general’s changes of command and promotions.

Last year, Anderson invited him to participate in a Sept. 11 memorial in Kabul. During that visit, Roever met Wafa.

The two now describe themselves – and Anderson – as brothers.

“If it had not been for Gen. Anderson, this would not have happened,” Roever said.

He said his organization was more than willing to help the Afghans at no cost.

As he sat and listened to the commandos’ stories, Roever said he became aware of the many similarities between the commandos and U.S. soldiers, despite the language barrier.

Heroes

The four men Wafa handpicked to start the wounded warrior program live up to the lofty expectations that come with the commando moniker.

Wafa used his position to ensure they were allowed to continue to serve, even as others pressured them to leave the military.

Nearing the end of the week in Texas, Wafa said he was proud of his men and said he had seen phenomenal things from them.

Wafa, a 31-year-old senior leader with 20 years of combat experience that began with the Northern Alliance, said he had spent three years working with some of the men to get them to tell their stories.

At Eagles Summit Ranch, the commandos opened up more in a single week than they had in those previous years, Wafa said.

From the beginning of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Wafa has been center stage.

He was a young captain in the Northern Alliance in 2001 when he provided the first Special Forces teams horses, inadvertently contributing to their nickname of “Horse Soldiers.”

Those were the first foreigners Wafa had ever met.

He also was there when Mike Spann, the first U.S. casualty of the war in Afghanistan, was killed. The pair had been living alongside each other, Wafa said, bowing his head in respect.

And in the years that have followed, Wafa has developed even tighter bonds with his U.S. counterparts.

He trained at Fort Bragg for two years – the most important years of his life, Wafa said – and continues to make frequent trips to meet with military leaders in what he calls his second home.

Afghanistan still has much to learn from its American partners, Wafa said, including how to care for its wounded warriors.

The concept is a new one for the country, he said.

“I think that without the wounded warrior program, we can’t train more heroes,” Wafa said. “Our army is volunteer. If they don’t see support, they would leave.”

Eagles Summit Ranch

Wafa said he eventually hopes to have soldiers stationed across Afghanistan to work with wounded warriors in their own communities.

The visit to Texas was the first step in that process, he said.

“I have to find the right people first, who can learn to help the others,” Wafa said. “It’s train the trainers.”

Wafa believes he has the right foundation with the four commandos who accompanied him.

Each described going above and beyond the line of duty in the moments before their injuries and a will to again contribute to the Afghan army, even if it’s in this new capacity.

“This is a long process,” Wafa said. “But it’s phenomenal. This will be a lot of work. We will need international donations. But I will do my best.”

Roever said his organization will be there to help.

“We’re here,” he said, stressing the partnership won’t end when the Afghans leave Texas.

The organization is committed to helping to build a headquarters for the Afghan wounded warrior program in Afghanistan, he said.

Roever’s son, Matt, said the Afghans underwent a program known as Operation Warrior RECONnect, which was meant to build self-esteem among wounded warriors through mentoring, educational opportunities and tools for overcoming physical injury and post-traumatic stress.

They heard from various wounded warriors and participated in team-building and therapeutic activities. The program ended with a graduation ceremony that included public remarks to the congregation of nearby Cavalry Temple Church, longtime supporters of the Roever Foundation.

Matt Roever said the stories he heard the Afghans tell were similar to those he’s heard from Fort Bragg wounded warriors.

The Fort Bragg soldiers have a reputation for heroism and selfless acts being tied to their injures, he said.

“You never heard a sob story out of Bragg,” he said. “The commandos have adapted to that culture. It’s part of the process of them being able to talk about it.”

Care

Master Sgt. Troy Konvicka, a representative of the CARE Coalition based in nearby San Antonio, made a short presentation to the commandos on behalf of his organization, which supports wounded, ill or injured special operations forces and their families.

He stayed with the Afghans for two days, urging them on as they opened up about their injuries.

“Every one of you went above and beyond,” Konvicka told them. “Y’all need to be the face of wounded warriors in Afghanistan.”

But Konvicka said the soldiers cannot do it alone.

“You have a great plan,” he said. “But you’re going to have people with you.”

In Afghanistan, amputees aren’t seen as useful members of society, Konvicka said.

“They feel that you’re not whole,” he said, and the commandos will have a tough time changing that perception.

But, he said, similar perceptions were common in the U.S. military until recently.

“Everything starts small,” he said.

The U.S. takes its support structure for granted, he said, but it has grown tremendously over the past decade. It was only recently that U.S. troops missing limbs were allowed to return to combat.

A wounded warrior program can help make similar advances in Afghanistan, Konvicka said.

“It’s important that they establish a foundation and support channel, not just for their soldiers but for their soldiers’ families,” he said. “If a soldier knows, ‘I’m going to be taken care of,’ you will see better quality recruits.”

They want to take care of their own, Konvicka said, and the American system can be a model for Afghanistan.

Charity

A day before graduation, Matt Roever had a surprise for the Afghan commandos.

After three days of sessions, the men asked foundation leaders why they had not heard from women.

Wafa said hearing a woman’s perspective was important for the soldiers, given the number of Afghan women injured by insurgent attacks.

So on Thursday, Matt Roever proudly presented a friend of the foundation, Charity Freeland.

Freeland received second- and third-degree burns over 75 percent of her body in a fiery car accident at age 17.

She had heard Dave Roever speak to her class the year before, she said, and found comfort in his story as she lay burning in a car on a Texas highway.

“I remembered from Dave’s story that this was something that I could live through,” she said.

Charity was on her way to a school event when her car hydroplaned during a storm and collided with oncoming traffic.

Her sister and a friend escaped, but she was trapped in the burning car until a jammed seat belt snapped in the heat, freeing her but not before she had been covered in flames.

As Charity told her painful story and detailed her recovery, which included 30 surgeries, the commandos sat at rapt attention.

One, Mirwais, openly wept. Another told Charity she was stronger than all of the commandos.

“The scars can never go away,” Charity said. “They couldn’t make me what I was before.”

“I had to make choices, even there in the hospital. I did not want to be an angry, bitter person. . I didn’t want people to pity me or feel sorry for me.”

But, Charity said, she did have to learn how to educate others on how to treat her – a battle the commandos are all too familiar with.

“When I meet people, I don’t expect them to treat me badly,” Charity said. “If I see myself as broken and of no value, other people will see me as broken and of no value.

“The outside doesn’t match inside.”

Mirwais

After Freeland spoke, the Afghans took turns telling their own stories.

Mirwais, missing his left leg from above the knee, hopped to the chair in the center of the ranch veranda when it was time to tell his story.

After he was injured in Kandahar province, Mirwais had only one person on his mind – his love of four years.

In a hospital, he told his fiance to leave him.

“My life is already ruined and destroyed,” he said.

She refused, Mirwais said with a smile. “She said ‘No, I just need your two eyes and that’s enough.'”

Mirwais’ journey began as a young man in Afghanistan who eagerly read of the commandos in newspapers and listened to stories of their heroics on the radio.

He wanted to join the military at a young age. He wanted to be a commando, he said, and he achieved his goals.

But just three months into his assignment with the special operations kandak in Kandahar, Mirwais was injured while clearing buildings on a joint U.S.-Afghan patrol.

Mirwais said he was following behind engineers clearing a path into a building when he stepped on an improvised explosive device.

Wafa jokes that with his first words after the explosion, Mirwais cursed the engineers who had gone before him.

But Mirwais said he only remembers screaming for help while still aflame.

To his rescue came two American soldiers, who jumped on the commando, smothered the flames and carried him to a helicopter.

“I’m a patriot. I don’t care that I lost my leg. . My job was to fight for Afghan freedom,” he said while thanking the people of the country that saved his life.

Looking around at his fellow commandos, Mirwais said he no longer feels like his life was ruined.

“I’m not alone,” he said.

 

When the U.S. Strategy is to no Longer Lead

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Symptomatic of when a country is war weary, the rules of engagement are re-tooled, removing hostilities and the will to win fades away, the wake of destruction becomes worse. How many times has this occurred? Korea, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and more. If it is not up to the United States of America, then who?

Korea

Sudan

Cambodia

Sinjar Mountain, Iraq

Libya

Dafur

Syria

 

Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to the ‘butcher’ 40 years ago

American envoy, a German-born Jew, recalls horrors of Pol Pot’s regime, regrets Washington’s ‘abandonment’ of allies

PARIS (AP) — Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.

Forty years later and 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 kilometers) away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”

Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history — the first of several US interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.

“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”

Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.

Many foreigners present during the final months — diplomats, aid workers, journalists — remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh’s death throes, by the heartbreaking loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls Washington’s “indecent act.”

I count myself among those foreigners, a reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third-country nationals. I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die.

For the general public, the pullout is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the mass, hysteric flight from Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War three weeks later. But for historians and political analysts, the withdrawal from Cambodia signifies the first of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger termed “bug-outs.”

“It was the first time Americans came anywhere close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there is that we are still seeing it happen,” says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA officer in Saigon and author of “Decent Interval,” which depicts the final years of the Vietnam War. After Cambodia and Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.

Today, at 89, Dean, a German-born Jew, and his French wife reside in a patrician quarter of Paris, in an elegant apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the same one that he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.

In the apartment’s vestibule hangs a framed letter signed by President Gerald R. Ford and dated Aug. 14, 1975. It highlights that Dean was “given one of the most difficult assignments in the history of the Foreign Service and carried it out with distinction.”

But Dean says: “I failed.”

“I tried so hard,” he adds. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”

The former ambassador to four other countries expresses more than guilt. He is highly critical of America’s violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early 1970s which killed thousands of civilians and radicalized, he believes, the Khmer Rouge. Once-peaceful Cambodia, he says, was drawn into war for America’s interests, a “sideshow” to Vietnam.

The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia propped up as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.

“The US wasn’t that concerned about what happened one way or the other in Cambodia but only concerned about it to the extent that it impacted positively or negatively on their situation in Vietnam,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Opinion on what went wrong in Cambodia remains split to this day. One view is that the country was destabilized by the American incursions and bombings; another is that Washington failed to provide the US-propped Lon Nol government with adequate military and other support.

In his memoirs, Kissinger says the US had no choice but to expand its efforts into the neighboring country, which the North Vietnamese were using as a staging area and armory for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam. And as Cambodia crumbled, he writes, anti-war elements, the media and Congress combined to tie the administration’s hands, preventing further assistance.

Dean is bitter that Kissinger and other power brokers in Washington did not support his quest to persuade ousted Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. It was Dean’s “controlled solution.”

“We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting, ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected,’” Dean said in earlier oral testimony. But Washington seemed unmoved.

“Ambassador Dean never had (President Richard) Nixon’s or Kissinger’s support because both of them wanted out of Indochina,” Snepp says.

By early 1975, the embassy’s cables, most of them declassified in 2006, were becoming increasingly frantic.

Meeting me one day, a haggard Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: “Isn’t there any sense of human decency left in us?”

“Phnom Penh was surrounded by explosions and a night sky of blossoming flares and streaks of tracer bullets,” I wrote in one of my stories at that time. “Children were dying of hunger, the hospitals looked more like abattoirs and the Cambodian army lost as many men in three months as the US did in a decade of war in South Vietnam.”

The Khmer Rouge were tightening their stranglehold on the capital, shutting down the airport from which the embassy had flown out several hundred Cambodians. An April 6 cable from Dean said the Cambodian government and army “seem to be expecting us to produce some miracle to save them. You and I know there will be no such miracle.”

Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh. The American public had had enough of the war.

Among Cambodians in the know, some anti-American feeling was growing.

“The Americans give temporary aid but ultimately they think only of themselves. We in Cambodia have been seduced and abandoned,” Chhang Song, a former information minister, said one night in early 1975.

But among Phnom Penh residents I found only smiles — “Americans are our fathers,” one vegetable vendor told me — along with a never-never-land mindset that things would turn out to be all right. Somehow.

“I honestly believe we did not do enough. There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people,” Dean says, explaining in part why he, a Jew, felt so strongly. “Now you must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”

Dean’s abiding emotions are shared by others of his former staff.

Alan Armstrong, the assistant defense attache, is still trying to complete a novel to exorcise what he went through. It is called “La Chute,” “The Fall.”

“I was paid by my government to smile, break bread (with Cambodians) and then betray my friends and colleagues. That’s a heavy burden to bear no matter how many years roll by,” says the retired US Army colonel. “The downfall of the Khmer Republic not only resulted in the deaths of countless Cambodians, it has also crept into our souls.”

Historians, distant from the passions of the actors, differ over Dean’s efforts and American culpability.

Benedict Kiernan, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Cambodia, says that given rifts within the Khmer Rouge leadership a political compromise earlier in the war might have been possible, resulting in a left-wing dominated coalition and not a fanatical revolution.

“Anything was worth trying to stop the Khmer Rouge before they got to Phnom Penh,” says Heder, the academic, who reported in Cambodia during the war and was among those evacuated from the capital.

Milton Osborne, an Australian historian and diplomat who served in Cambodia, describes Dean’s “controlled solution” as a “forlorn hope,” with the Khmer Rouge determined to win totally and execute Phnom Penh’s leaders. “By 1974, it was not a question of if, but when,” he says.

Snepp believes that Dean, desperately grasping at straws, was “living in fantasy land.”

Washington may have abandoned its ally, but the Cambodian elite also bears responsibility for its own demise. Snepp views President Lon Nol — corrupt, inept, superstitious and half-paralyzed — as one in a long line of similar leaders the United States would back in the following decades.

“What we have seen in all cases is that unless the US has a politically viable domestic partner, neither limited nor massive military intervention is going to succeed,” says Heder.

Timothy Carney, the embassy’s political officer, drawing on his record as ambassador to several countries, says that “tolerating corruption saps the legitimacy and support for whatever authority we are trying to prop up in a country.”

In the final days, Carney’s task was to persuade, unsuccessfully, Cambodian leaders to flee the country.

The night before the evacuation, Dean and his deputy drank some of the ambassador’s fine French wine so it wouldn’t fall into Khmer Rouge hands. The next morning, sitting in his office for the last time, he read a letter from Prince Sirik Matak in which the respected former deputy prime minister declined evacuation and thus sealed his own death. It read: “I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans.”

Dean today describes it as the “greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative.”

His embassy closed down at 9:45 a.m., the evacuees driven 10 blocks to a soccer field shielded by a row of apartment buildings from Khmer Rouge gunners about a mile away. The Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters were setting down. The Marines fanned out to form a security cordon around the landing zone.

But fears of possible reprisals by Cambodians proved unfounded.

Children and mothers scrambled over fences to watch. They cheered, clapped and waved to the 360 beefy, armed Marines. A Cambodian military policeman saluted Armstrong smartly. Disgusted and ashamed, he dropped his helmet and rifle, leaving them behind.

I tried to avoid looking into faces of the crowd. Always with me will be the children’s little hands aflutter and their singsong “OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye.”

By 12:15 the last helicopters landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa waiting off the Cambodian coast. Tactically, the 2 1/2-hour operation had been flawless.

In Phnom Penh, Douglas Sapper, an ex-Green Beret who stayed behind to save his company’s employees, recalled the reaction of Cambodians who realized what had happened: “It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead.”

Five days later we received a cable from Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety. Instead he wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender and gunpoint evacuation. “I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling,” he messaged. “Do not know how to file our stories now … maybe last cable today and forever.”

Barry Broman, then a young diplomat, remembers a Cambodian woman who worked upcountry monitoring the war for the embassy who had also refused evacuation.

“One day she said, ‘They are in the city,’ and her contact said ‘OK, time to go.’ She refused. Later she reported, ‘They are in the building,’ and again refused to leave her post. Her last transmission was, ‘They are in the room. Good-bye.’ The line went dead.”